Externalize your thoughts through written notes to easily choose and work on a research topic

Make notes consistently.
Write down the thoughts and ideas that may pop into your mind. For example, take notes whenever you’re listening to a lecture or a seminar, doing household chores, or reading literature. You can then number these notes to link relevant ones together, thinking about the context in which they can prove valuable. With time, these notes will cluster, and questions will naturally arise from them.

Go through your notes.
The slip-box approach to taking notes is designed so that your ideas, thoughts, and comments related to each other are numbered and stored accordingly. While going through these notes and following the linked chains of linked notes, think about the questions that start to form from these notes.

Select a topic and translate your notes into a manuscript.
Once you have found the questions and the topic that you’d like to work on, start converting those chains of notes into a manuscript by building cohesive arguments based on your notes.